‘Mr. Haldane! What has happened to him?’
‘Fegs, miss, it seems that last night, as he was descendin’ the steps from the vesthry, he thripped, God help us! an’ fell on his ugly mug an’ broke his front teeth.’
‘Oh, how dreadful!’ says Susan, real compassion in her tone, though the new curate is rather farther beyond the range of her sympathy than even the old. ‘I wonder father hasn’t heard of it.’
‘It seems the poor gintleman is keeping it dark,’ says Miss Ricketty, ‘wid the thought of gettin’ thim put in agin widout anyone knowin’. But’—wrathfully—‘’twill be no use for him. I see that villain of a Salter down there’—with a glance out of the window—‘tellin’ every wan of it. Why, ye must have seen him yerself, miss, as ye come by.’ And suddenly Susan does remember the crowd round Salter’s shop-door, with Salter himself in its midst. ‘He’s got hould of it, for sure, and if he has ’twill be short shrift for Misther Haldane.’
‘But why?’ asks Susan.
‘Why, this, miss! He hates your clergy because he’s not in wid ye, like. A Methody he is; an’ Mr. Haldane goes agin his grain, wid the candles an’ the flowers an’ that, an’ he says how that Mr. Haldane had a dhrop too much last night when he thripped on the vesthry stairs.’
‘What a shame!’ says Susan indignantly. ‘I know for a fact that Mr. Haldane is——’
‘Yes, of course, miss. But that’s how thim Methodys does. An’ as for that Salter himself, I don’t believe in him. ’Tis a power o’ whisky he can get undher his own belt widout bein’ found out, until his timper is up. I know for a fact that ’twas only a week ago that he bate his poor wife until she let a screech out of her that would have waked Father D’Arcy himself, only that the seven sleepers aren’t a patch on him.’
It appears she cannot even spare her parish priest! Susan, who has risen, and who is now dragging Jacky from under the counter, where he has been in hot pursuit of a kitten, bids her old friend good-bye for the present.
‘You’ll tell Miss Barry about the clutch,’ says the spinster; and ‘Yes!’ shouts Susan into the terminus, a little louder than usual, perhaps, because Miss Ricketty lifts up her hand and shakes it at her reproachfully.